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The Work of Anne Geddes Gilchrist, O.B.E., F.S.A. 1863–1954
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1957
Extract
When, in 1935, Sir Richard Terry was editing the Scottish Psalter-tunes and was looking for information concerning the Revd. Neil Livingston, whose monumental recension of the Psalter he so greatly admired, he found the nearest surviving relative of this divine and scholar, Anne Gilchrist, living outside Lancaster in a spacious Victorian house high above the estuary of the Lune. Its windows looked westwards to the lakeland mountains, the sea, and the countryside where as a girl she had walked, sailed and fished, and exchanged plants with the future Regius Professor of Botany, and where she made the archæological discoveries cited at her election to the Society of Antiquaries. At that time she was just over 70, still in the prime of her intellectual life, and with another twenty years before her.
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- Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1957
References
1 The Scottish Psalter of 1635, edited with modal harmonies by R. R. Terry, Novello, 1935.Google Scholar
2 Published by private subscription in 1864.Google Scholar
3 see A Forgotten Psalter, O.U.P., 1929.Google Scholar
4 The writer is indebted to Miss Gilchrist's youngest sister, Mrs. Swainson, to Miss Maud Karpeles and to Mr. Frank Howes for papers and letters referring to these early days.Google Scholar
5 The late Professor Sir William Wright-Smith.Google Scholar
6 Anne Gilchrist was admitted to the Society of Antiquaries in 1935. Two of these discoveries are described in papers read before the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archæological Society: A Mediaval Sculptured Stone presented to Grasmere Church; and A Late Anglian Cross-head and Anglo-Saxon Crucifix at Bentham, Yorks. She was also a member of the Cockersand Abbey Excavation Committee.Google Scholar
7 see ‘Frank Kidson, by some of his friends’, in JEFDSS, 1948; also ‘The Vitality of Melody’, in PRMA, 1908.Google Scholar
8 see the sections ‘Tune-books’ in ‘The Gilchrist Bequest’ by Margaret Dean-Smith, JEFDSS 1955. Three of Kidson's transcriptions, Forbes's Songs and Fancies, Henry Playford's Original Scotch Tunes, and Oswald's Companion for the Flute, Vol. III, are among the Gilchrist Bequest to the National Library of Scotland, others are at Cecil Sharp House; many are filled with commentaries, correspondence and annotations.Google Scholar
9 ‘The Gilchrist Bequest’ loc. cit. above, and FDJ, 1927.Google Scholar
10 JFSS 9 (1906), 19 (1915) and 21 (1918).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 ‘The Gilchrist Bequest’, loc. cit. above.Google Scholar
12 see particularly the article on Richard Weaver (Choir 1927) and transcriptions from his Tune-Book of 1861 at Cecil Sharp House.Google Scholar
13 ‘The Folk-Element in Early Revival Hymns and Tunes’, JFSS 32 (1928) and ‘The Gilchrist Bequest’ loc. cit. above.Google Scholar
14 An unique copy (not in British Museum) of Ancient Orkney Melodies by Colonel David Balfour of Balfour, 1885, was acquired by another member of the Society's Editorial Board, the Revd. E. A. White, and passed to and fro between himself and Miss Gilchrist, each capping the other's annotations. Their article on the songs is in JEFDSS 1938 and 1939.Google Scholar
15 JEFDSS 1938, ‘Sacred Parodies of Secular Songs’.Google Scholar
16 The appendix to A. F. Mitchell's recension of the 1567 edition (Scottish Text Society, 1897) contains numerous tentative attributions.Google Scholar
17 Forbes, Songs and Fancies, 1662, No. 19, ‘The gowans are gay, my jo’, from Straloch MS., 1627. The Orkney May Carol (op. cit.) shows a similar use, so does that very unabashed ballad ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’. A comparison with Farmer's Slang and its Analogues would bear out many of her conclusions.Google Scholar